Every mid-o-night, a new set of illusions and games -- and then...poof! The Trauma Center.

The Luna Park Ghost Amusement Zone, as Delmore would have known it from his childhood, may have vaporously lurked on, much like the Zone of Concern around Chernobyl, after the closing of the original LP in 1944.

It’s the final elephant ride postcard that does it for me, cementing as it does the artifice/artificial vs. what it really looked like aspect of this Luna Park retrospective.

That is to say, that even if the real Luna Park viewed in person looked faker (like theater or movie scenery as it does in the colored illustrations) than in the splendid black & white photos, it must have been really something.

I don’t know whether you’ve ever seen the dreadful South Street Seaport development in Manhattan or the big multi-use sports emporium they built on the lower Hudson, the replacement Wollman Rink or the new Barclay’s arena in Brooklyn, but today that’s all we have in Manhattan (I’m leaving out the new Yankee Stadium because it’s in the Bronx) and they aren’t a patch on this.

The sad abstractions of the Schwartz poem and its formal structure convey so well the lost in thought (and every other receding thing) mood of this post, which should be a book on its own.

Shooting the chutes must have been great (and I don't like rides much), but Fatty Arbuckle always scares me to death.

Poor brilliant precocious mad Delmore, who gave us "Far Rockaway" in poems and dreams like movies in which were born responsibilities that are real if ill-defined: friend of Lowell, Berryman: Harvard teacher of the best minds of their generation (circa 1948). Let us takge this occasion to reread his great stories, such as "The World is a Wedding.